The Other Intelligence Assessments on Iraq

"The Other Intelligence Assessments on Iraq"

http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=14564

Paul R. Pillar  previews  a longer article that will appear in a forthcoming issue of The National Interest, a publication of  The Nixon Center.

The intelligence estimate on Iraqi  weapons programs that was highly criticized in a 500-page report by  the Senate Intelligence Committee when they released it in July 2004, and subsequently excoriated  in another 500-page report by a presidentially appointed commission  was only one of three intelligence assesments. The weapons estimate was one of only three classified, community-coordinated assessments about Iraq that the intelligence community produced in the months prior to the war. Now the other two that were pre-Iraq war  other have been released in redacted form by the Senate Intelligence Committee. This was done with little publicity on the Memorial Day weekend: 

http://intelligence.senate.gov/prewar.pdf

 Mr. Pillar writes:

"I initiated those latter two assessments and supervised their drafting and coordination. My responsibilities at the time as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia concerned analysis on political, economic and social issues in the region. A duty of any intelligence officer is not only to respond to policymakers’ requests but also to anticipate their future needs. With the administration’s determination to go to war having become painfully clear during 2002, I undertook these assessments to help policymakers, and those charged with executing their policies, make sense of what they would be getting into after Saddam was gone. Following a common practice of the National Intelligence Council with many self-initiated projects, we got a policy office—in this case the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff—to provide cover of sorts by agreeing to be listed as the customer of record."

These assessments concerned the challenges that Iraq likely would present  after Saddam’s removal, and repercussions in the surrounding region.

Mr. Pillar writes:

"The two assessments, which contained very little sensitive reporting, should have been far easier to declassify than the Top Secret estimate on weapons....The assessments support the proposition that the expedition in Iraq always was a fool’s errand rather than a good idea spoiled by poor execution, implying that the continued search for a winning strategy is likely to be fruitless."

The administration did not request or read these assessments, according to Mr. Pillar., although some in Congress did read them.  Mr. Pillar describes the partisanship and politicalization in Congress that prevented thes papers from being released until now . The value  of the intelligence community's  work on Iraq has been unfairly judged,  and they have been scagegoated , in Mr. Pillar's  view: "[They] ... offered judgments on the issues that turned out to be most important in the war (as distinct from ones the administration had used to sell the war), even though those judgments conspicuously contradicted the administration’s rosy vision for Iraq. And for the most part, those judgments were correct."